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pjbrubak
Brubaker's breakthrough documentary on the film festival circuit was The National Hollerin' Contest (2003) about the peculiar North Carolina tradition. Brubaker filmed Brushes With Life: Art, Artists and Mental Illness (2009) an advocacy documentary that featured frank interviews with several artists who live with diagnoses like schizophrenia, bipolar, borderline personality disorder and other conditions. That film won a couple of industry awards and Brubaker received a grant from Eli Lilly for his positive and stigma-busting depiction of people who many would simply dismiss as 'crazy.'
Brubaker was a member of the first class of students in Duke University's breakthrough graduate program in Experimental and Documentary Arts in 2011-2013. In 2016, Brubaker began a partnership with the streaming service Fandor, which resulted in the publication of more than 100 video essays Brubaker created over a two-year period. After Fandor's dissolution, Brubaker began a new chapter in his career as a filmmaker which he shares on his personal Vimeo and YouTube pages.
Reviews
Around the Sun (2019)
A charming world to be in for a while
Around the Sun is a two-character drama in the French countryside. Because of its secluded setting, it develops a kind of intimacy not seen in most contemporary movies. We simply observe two people tour a chateau and wax poetic on philosophy and love, among other things. There were moments that surprised me, but throughout I enjoyed being in that charming world.
White Cop (2014)
'White Cop' is hysterically funny
You will know very early in this low-budget, underground comedy if it is the kind of humor you find funny. I find it freaking hilarious. It is the sort of comedy where the plot is something you might see in an actual cop movie, but the performances, action and dialogue are all absurdly ridiculous. Which is quite a feat - I mean, while the movie comes across as being completely silly, you can tell a lot of intelligence went into making it seem so incompetent. The "plot" as it were, concerns Kip White (perhaps the whitest cop to ever grace the silver screen?) who is attempting to bust a ring of criminals in Chicago. But the plot is really just an excuse to have throbbing dream wave music accompany slow-mo drug busts, deranged sex scenes and even a swanky yacht ride. The filmmakers behind 'White Cop' are part of the comedy theater scene in Chicago and you've got to hand it to them for a film that seems so crazy it's quite consistent. It's the funniest movie I've seen all year, and I would definitely place it in my top ten for 2014. I'm glad to have seen it at Geeksboro Coffeehouse Cinema here in Greensboro, NC, because it's important to support indie filmmaking; even the kind that never makes it to an art house chain theater. The filmmakers behind 'White Cop' succeeded in making me and the whole theater howl with laughter throughout the whole screening. I look forward to future films from director Jake Myers and his irreverent team of ragamuffins. There's more to movies than just the multiplexes, people.
Philip Brubaker
La science des rêves (2006)
Great. Wonderful. I loved it!
I really needed this movie when I saw it. It's a bittersweet tale of a young man who can't differentiate between his dreams and reality, and the girl he pines after. The dream sequences are totally enchanting and I found myself beguiled by Michel Gondry's ingenuity. There are many funny parts, but overall it's a fantastic story full of vintage special effects that Hollywood would surely shun in favor of some CGI crud. Science of Sleep explores the dream world with such vividness and detail, you'll think you're dreaming while you watch it. Sensitive, artistic young men (like myself) can definitely relate to pursuing an object of affection who is out of reach, but close enough to fantasize about. This is a worthy successor to Gondry's previous masterpiece: "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
8/10
Grizzly Man (2005)
Grizzly Man shows Herzog's Still Got it
Grizzly Man re-establishes Werner Herzog as one of the most provocative directors to emerge from the New German Cinema movement of the 1970's. While other filmmakers his age are losing their edge, Herzog's passion for madness and nature finds a foothold in this compelling and tragic story. He is obviously fascinated with Treadwell, the ill-fated title character, despite disagreeing with his foolish grandiosity. Herzog knows what it is like to tempt fate and there is no better director to handle this material than he.
In Aguirre, The Wrath of God, he took a skeleton crew of filmmakers deep in to the jungle on a raft made of logs. In Fitzcarraldo, Herzog tried to haul a riverboat over an Amazon mountain. Herzog in public has declared that one must respect nature and not try and do as Treadwell had done. For many, the reasons would be obvious. But Herzog disagreed with Treadwell's romanticized notions about bears being "lovable" creatures. Herzog saw them only as "heartless murderers."
No doubt the director is fascinated with his material, and perhaps even wants to honor Treadwell's memory by giving him the spotlight he so desperately wanted while he was alive. While that may have eluded Treadwell in his life, in death, thanks to Herzog, he has achieved immortality.
Philip Brubaker philip@philipbrubaker.com
Stroszek (1977)
Images Speak a Thousand Words
Stroszek
analysis by Philip Brubaker
Werner Herzog's Stroszek (1977) is a film both in German and English. The three main characters flee Germany for the promise of opportunity in America. In Berlin, they find themselves victims of vicious brutes, who prostitute Ewa, Stroszek's friend. Stroszek himself is just released from a mental institution. The two outcasts hook up with an eccentric old man and decided to move to Wisconsin, where the old man's nephew lives. Stroszek has been called Herzog's most accessible film, a distinction due to it's time-worn fish-out-of-water premise. But the archetypal humor of the situation turns black as Ewa begins to revert to her promiscuous ways, and the group's double wide gets impounded and auctioned off by the bank. Stroszek's life is falling apart, so what does he do? He attempts to rob a bank.
The failure of the American Dream is the story of every criminal in the United States. By turning to crime, the criminal hopes to regain the hope of being rich, by any means necessary. The American Dream failed Stroszek, and this idea is represented by many striking images.
The most overt symbol in the film are the two farmers who mow their grass toting shotguns. The tractor-riding farmers are both watching over a strip of land in between their properties, making sure neither one is attempting to mow it, and therefore claim it as their own. The scene is played for laughs, but it is a pointed reference to Stroszek's hometown of Berlin, with it's harsh division by the Berlin Wall.
The Native American character is the ultimate symbol of America. He is both a foreigner and a native. A stranger to the white man's culture, a culture of European immigrants. When Stroszek makes his farewell ride to the Indian Reservation town of Cherokee, he drives right into the heart of the American dilemma. Here he is surrounded by the last vestiges of American Indian culture, now warped and perverted into a tourist attraction, an example of American grotesquerie at it's lowest low. An old-timey holler is heard on the soundtrack and our hero ditches his car and climbs onto a chair lift ride with his shotgun. As the camera tilts up to his slow ascent up a tall mountain, a shot rings out. Did Stroszek take his own life? Appropriately, Herzog leaves this ambiguous. His rise upward on the chair lift is symbolic of the ascent to Heaven, Shangri-La, Eldorado and every dreamed mythical place that foreigners imagine America to be. He is going home.
The Big Shave (1967)
Scorsese's bloodiest film
The ritual of shaving and it's risks is explored by a young Scorsese. Surely every man has felt the fear/temptation of cutting one's self with a razor. A typical outlet for his self-loathing Catholic guilt, the gore is contrapuntally balanced by incongruous music on the soundtrack. Bunny Berigan's "I Can't Get Started" recalls the blackly comic ending to "Dr. Strangelove" with "We'll Meet Again" accompanying images of nuclear holocaust. Strangely, the young man in the feature is not in need of a shave in the slightest. And he shaves a second time in a row, the second time with bloody consequences. As other reviewers have posted, there may be some symbolic significance to this short film. Knowing Scorsese, it undoubtedly operates on many levels. It is to his credit as a filmmaker that he is able to make a solitary, mundane task so attention-grabbing.
Spend It All (1972)
Cajun Country - SPOILER ALERT -
Independent filmmaker-cum-cultural anthropologist Les Blank has made his career out of documenting marginalized regional American subcultures. In Spend It All, he focuses his lens on Southwest Louisiana, specifically the Cajuns, a fun-loving people descended from French colonists in Canada, then known as Acadia. The film sets up the history of these people in the beginning, following an exuberant montage set to vital Cajun music. Music figures prominently into the lives of these men and is part and parcel of the philosophy behind the Cajun lifestyle: Work hard, earn your money and then spend it all having fun. The film does contain a notorious scene that is worth the price of admission. An excruciatingly self-reliant Cajun uses a pair of pliers to actually extract one of his teeth, that had, in his words, "been hurting [him] for a few days now." The scene sums up what it means to be rural and self-reliant. German filmmaker Werner Herzog was so taken by the rawness of this moment that he copied it for his 1977 film Stroszek, set largely in rural America. Blank and Herzog were close, and the documentarian gets a special thank you in the credits for Stroszek. The accents in Spend It All are sometimes impenetrable, but always fascinating and the near-constant fiddle and accordion music on the soundtrack turns an ostensibly "educational" film into a rollicking good time. Blank's movies are succinct and this is no exception. Spend It All does not overstay its welcome at 42 minutes, mainly because of the intimacy that the filmmaker achieves with his colorful and worthy subjects. Fans of this film should check out Sprout Wings and Fly and Dry Wood to complete their initiation into the world of Cajun and rural folk music.